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Eidos Montreal's narrative director Steven Gallagher for Thief has revealed that the new game was left to a small team and in the concept phase for a long time to avoid "million dollar disasters" happening.

They were given the task of reinventing Thief and went through many ideas. Some stuff "went on the table and was quickly taken off", and then buried. They tried an Assassin's Creed approach.

At one point they had so many third-to-first-person camera shifts that people actually felt ill. The Eidos team floated the idea of a new character with full environment traversal.

"Concepting was a really cool time," Steven Gallagher told Game Informer. "There were a lot of ideas. It was very creatively energetic, but there was a lot of stuff that went on the table and was quickly taken off the table, and then placed in a dark room never to be seen."

"Some of the early concept stuff had Garrett a little too soft in his approach. That was a fine line to walk. I had a lot of problems with some of the early focus tests because I had turned his movements up too much towards the female spectrum." The studio added Splinter Cell's Stephane Roy as a producer to help steer the team back on track.

"I noticed that when I asked several directors about the original mandate, there was no clear answer," Roy explained. "When you try a lot of things, sometimes it's difficult to keep the focus."

"You try this and you try that and you forget what the game is about. It happened a couple of times where we were wrong, and that was tough on the team, but at the end of the day, people on the game really believe in Thief."